Competitive advantages are inconceivable without renewal. cbs has set itself the goal of identifying new opportunities at an early stage
South America is known for particularly complex legal requirements. The fact that today no cbs customer need fear an SAP implementation and system operation in Brazil is thanks to the innovative spirit of a few consultants who started their first projects in Rio and Sao Paulo at the end of the 1990s. They took SAP’s “Nota Fiscal Eletrônica – Nfe” solution and used it to develop a specially tailored cloud solution for government communications. This later gave rise to the cbs success product E-Invoice-World-Cloud. The all-round worry-free package offers automatic, end-2-end integrated B-2-G solutions for 15 countries, with many more in the pipeline. In the meantime, 4.7 million transactions have already been processed worldwide with the cloud solution.
“Our idea is to develop market-driven new business models from SAP’s early product ideas and thus make new solutions usable for the requirements of global market leaders. These can then be further developed in a sustainable manner,” explains Markus Geib, member of the Executive Board.
Tapping into new concepts is one of cbs’ drives
Tapping into the latest technologies, business models, concepts and methods to create highly innovative customer solutions is one of cbs’ original drives, and innovations have always been at the heart of its ambitions. “They give our corporate concept its thrust. The hunger for new things, the desire to adopt new things, combined with the search for solutions, with passion for the thing itself and the ambition to make something special out of it, is in our genes,” emphasizes CEO Rainer Wittwen.
the customer.
They must become solutions.
Technologies, business constructs and customized methods are just the ingredients. The crucial thing is the active ingredient that combines them and sets them in motion. “The innovative energy of our consultants is what really moves us forward as cbs,” says Geib.
The history of cbs is also the history of this innovative energy. For more than 25 years, it has been pushing consultants to solve customers’ challenges in a future-oriented, creatively designed and sustainable way.
Example ONE Finance – cbs has developed a solution package and the matching, holistic consulting approach that enables industrial groups to take the step from heterogeneous structures, processes and systems into the Intelligent Enterprise based on globally harmonized, digital finance and accounting under S/4HANA.
Example cbs ET Enterprise Transformer and Selective Data Transition (SDT) to S/4HANA – what once started in the 90s as R/2-R/3 migration in close cooperation with SAP is today both a key element in the unique complete portfolio and an independent service and software business for holistic transformation solutions. Selective has long since been declared a global standard by SAP and has proven its market maturity in exceptional pioneering projects in the manufacturing industry.
Globally integrated end-to-end processes
Example myleo/dsc from the cbs subsidiary leogistics – with the help of real-time data, the cloud platform simplifies transport management in a process-as-a-service solution. It connects producers, suppliers, warehouses and freight forwarders, creating a holistic supply chain network.
What does innovativeness mean today – for large, international industrial customers who run a good part of their business with SAP software? Jürgen Remmert, member of the Executive Board: “Our customers are faced with the major task of digital transformation and must successfully integrate this into their corporate vision, the global end-to-end business process platform of the future. Making this connection is a delightful task.”
Creating digital end-to-end business processes means digitizing processes, eliminating media discontinuities, optimizing and streamlining them. The aim is to incorporate the potential of cloud computing, big data, AI and robotics into business processes. The trend is to create new processes for networked business models: Pay per Use, Predictive Maintenance, Integrated Business Planning, MRP live, Margin Analysis. Digital, data-driven innovations are changing practice: future IT systems are actively making suggestions to the user, the push principle is replacing the pull, a new user centricity is changing perspectives, the trend towards gamification is changing the business process culture and the way problems are solved.
“Companies are in a permanent process of transformation. No one can predict what the business will look like in five or even ten years. That’s why you have to align your IT systems so that they are as flexible and agile as possible, so that you can react to rapid changes in the market and to new competitors. We are the right partner for this,” says Consulting Director Henning Krug.
Strong expertise in the area of BTP
The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the strategic basis for innovation. “As a first mover, we have been working with the BTP since 2015 and launched our first customer projects a year later. In the meantime, we have put more than 100 apps live – including for Dax companies such as Henkel, Merck and Brenntag,” reports Consulting Director Karsten Kötter. We are involved in the DSAG, and two of my colleagues were recently elected as spokespersons for the new DSAG BTP working group. We are also the spokesperson for the “UI/UX Technologies” working group. This also shows that cbs is leading the way when it comes to innovative topics.
“Innovations are not an end in themselves. They have to reach the customer. They have to become solutions,” says Kötter. A claim that is derived from customer requirements. The digital transformation of cbs customers is a multi-layered and interdisciplinary task that companies are not yet succeeding in holistically enough today. It’s not easy. “We believe that a specific overarching business approach for SAP customers needs to be developed that gives more leadership and concreteness to the iterative process of digitizing the company’s target image. We are currently working on such an offering for the Chief Digital Officer,” says CEO Rainer Wittwen.
